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Don’t let language be a hurdle in your business

Lean Manufacturing[1] involves constant efforts to eliminate or reduce ‘muda’ (Japanese term defining waste or any activity that consumes resources without adding value) in design, manufacturing, distribution and customer service processes.

As an operational system, Lean Manufacturing maximizes added value, reduces essential support and eliminates waste in all processes throughout the value chain. Waste in this regard may include over-production, inventory tasks, waiting time, correction, transportation and over-processing.

In summary, the equation for Lean Management is: Increased profitability equals increasing prices or reducing costs. A big part of the cost is the turnaround time between an order being placed and when it is shipped.

What is your Manufacturing Lead Time from the placement of an order to shipping? What would you expect as the standard for your business? What do you foresee as a likely evolution for both you and your customers?Continue reading →

The world has become a global village: electronic commerce is truly international and must be standardized

The 2nd Logistics Information Standardization Forum held in Seoul, South Korea on September 2016, brought together a host of actors in an effort to standardize international logistics information as a key factor in improving logistic processes in business. The forum put forth the creation of an international consensus for a cooperation system on international logistics information.

At the AFNET association, we promote and develop such standards so as to improve relationships between organizations and enterprises. Standardizing electronic commerce for logistics means defining a common document structure for order processing transactions and product deliveries.

by Kirti Vashee on eMpTy Pages, a blog about translation technology, localization and collaboration

Recently, I had the opportunity and kind invitation to attend the SYSTRAN community day event where many members of their product development, marketing, and management team gathered with major customers and partners.

The objective was to share information about the continuing evolution of their new Pure Neural MT (PNMT) technology, share detailed PNMT output quality evaluation results, and provide initial customer user experience data with the new technology. Also, naturally such an event creates a more active and intense dialogue between company employees and customers and partners. This, I think has substantial value for a company that seeks to align product offerings with its customer’s actual needs.

Ongoing Enhancements of the PNMT Product Offering

The event made it clear that SYSTRAN is well down the NMT path, possibly years ahead of other MT vendors, and provided a review of the current status of their rapidly evolving PNMT technology.

Round-trip translation (RTT), also known as back-and-forth translation, recursive translation and bi-directional translation, is the process of translating a word, phrase or text into another language (forward translation), then translating the result back into the original language (back translation), using machine translation (MT) software.
It is often used by laypeople to evaluate a machine translation system, or to test whether a text is suitable for MT when they are unfamiliar with the target language. Because the resulting text can often differ substantially from the original, RTT can also be a source of entertainment*.

Yesterday I translated our company presentation with Systran’s new Pure Neural™ Machine Translation (PNMT™) engine, and I was amazed at the results.

The presentation in question was a complete overview of all of our services, 59 pages of French text that was edited three separate times to make sure the quality was perfect. (Thanks Faten, Boris and Laurence!)

Then, two days ago, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the presentation for a response to an RFP (Request For Proposals), I found out that our prospective client (a major French manufacturer) wanted our response in English. I had just one day to deliver 59 pages of perfect English content!

Let me give you some background to explain why I, the CEO of a translation company, decided to use Neural Machine Translation for one of our most important commercial documents for one of our most important tenders.

Following the publication of the Basel (II and III) and Solvency Regulations, implementing Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) practices within financial institutions has gained predominance. To meet the challenges of data governance stated in the pillars of these regulations, companies have multiplied their efforts to recruit the best in GRC concerning Risk Management, Internal control, Internal Audit and Compliance.

According to a study conducted by the consulting company Optimind Winter and mandated by the Observatoire des métiers de la Banque (Banking Career Observatory)[1], “Banking companies are also victims of new risks and must create new job profiles to deal with these new challenges. GRC departments must face new challenges, such as coverage of systemic risk, development of Cloud Computing or Mobile Bank (technological nomadism).” Here, we refer to digitalizing the banking sector and using the Internet to manage personal bank accounts. Banks and insurance companies have thus implemented solutions to protect their customers’ data against cyber-attacks. While the efforts made to secure customer data have proven effective, the threat now lies within financial companies in their daily workflow.

Along with new working methods, a new phenomenon has emerged, known as “Shadow IT,” which is any application or method of transmitting information used in a business process without the endorsement of the internal IS department. Often unaware of its existence, IT departments don’t provide any support. Such processes generate "informal" and non-controlled data that can contravene existing standards and regulations such as Basel and Solvency. Continue reading →

AFNET, a non-profit society for boosting the digital transformation within vertical industries

AFNET is a French non-profit organization that promotes best practices for processes within the extended enterprises. This society introduces Internet in France in 1992 and was the owner for delivering Internet access to the very first users, mainly in universities.

Since this early age, AFNET has been continuing to promote good practices for enterprises within their ecosystem of suppliers, partners and key customers. These IT practices consist on standards, a common information system, and a partner framework for co-working in confidence.

Today, the best approach consists to leverage industry verticals to build open systems for digital transaction, content collaboration and product design.

Corporations are grouped within industry verticals and are highly dependent themselves. Just a few examples: Do you know that less than 20% of Dassault Rafale airplane parts are done by Dassault Aviation itself? Do you know that behind an Airbus air plane, there is a network of more than 1,200 different suppliers structured by more than 5 depth levels?

To be competitive and efficient within our globalized world, the European aerospace industry had organized itself with AFNET expert assistance to create a common information system named BoostAeroSpace: AirSupply as the platform for managing the supply chain, AirCollab as the platform for data communication exchange and Airdesign as the platform for product design. All these highly-secured platforms managed by the nonprofit organization and financed by all aerospace members make a strong asset that contributes to Airbus success.

Similar projects are in progress today for automotive, energy, travels, that leverage aerospace good practices. All of them share the common vision of the extended enterprise. Continue reading →

We are SYSTRAN. We love languages, lots of languages. We are a human-sized company but we have linguists for almost all of the 140 language pairs we support. That’s a big number, but don’t be misled- some of us are fluent in many languages. Nevertheless, we love languages and we don’t believe in the one-fits-all technology regarding language processing.